I’ve been trying to delve deeper into predictive processing theories of the brain, and I keep coming across Karl Friston’s work on “free energy”.

At first I felt bad for not understanding this. Then I realized I wasn’t alone. There’s an entire not-understanding-Karl-Friston internet fandom, complete with its own parody Twitter account and Markov blanket memes.

From the journal Neuropsychoanalysis (which based on its name I predict is a center of expertise in not understanding things):

At Columbia’s psychiatry department, I recently led a journal club for 15 PET and fMRI researhers, PhDs and MDs all, with well over $10 million in NIH grants between us, and we tried to understand Friston’s 2010 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper – for an hour and a half. There was a lot of mathematical knowledge in the room: three statisticians, two physicists, a physical chemist, a nuclear physicist, and a large group of neuroimagers – but apparently we didn’t have what it took. I met with a Princeton physicist, a Stanford neurophysiologist, a Cold Springs Harbor neurobiologist to discuss the paper. Again blanks, one and all.

Normally this is the point at which I give up and say “screw it”. But almost all the most interesting neuroscience of the past decade involves this guy in one way or another. He’s the most-cited living neuroscientist, invented large parts of modern brain imaging, and received of the prestigious Golden Brain Award for excellence in neuroscience, which is somehow a real thing. His Am I Autistic – An Intellectual Autobiography short essay, written in a weirdly lucid style and describing hijinks like deriving the Schrodinger equation for fun in school, is as consistent with genius as anything I’ve ever read.

As for free energy, it’s been dubbed “a unified brain theory” (Friston 2010), a key through which “nearly every aspect of [brain] anatomy and physiology starts to make sense” (Friston 2009), “[the source of] the ability of biological systems to resist a natural tendency to disorder” (Friston 2012), an explanation of how life “inevitably and emergently” arose from the primordial soup (Friston 2013), and “a real life version of Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory” (description here of Allen 2018).

I continue to hope some science journalist takes up the mantle of explaining this comprehensively. Until that happens, I’ve been working to gather as many perspectives as I c...

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